Machine products are manufactured by combining multiple parts and/or units. The parts and/or units are defined by location and/or section, and arranged in a parts catalog with assigned numbers for ordering and management.
The production of a parts catalog typically entails disassembly of the machine, preparation of exploded diagrams with illustrations of the parts, identification of the parts by assigning respective identification numbers with leaders and notes, and preparation of an order numbers list showing order numbers corresponding to the assigned identification numbers. The above production method involves high cost and high skill for the preparation of the illustrations and exploded diagrams. The process may be partly carried out in an automatic manner. However, even a partly automated production is manually finished by an operator to improve the page layout and the appearance of the catalog. Moreover, when changes are made to a part of the product, those changes may impel not only revision of the illustrations of that part, but also revision of the illustrations of other neighboring and associated parts.
To order a part using a parts catalog containing illustrations and exploded diagrams, a user typically performs a process of locating the intended part in an exploded diagram to obtain the part number, writing down the part identification number, and searching the order numbers list for an order number corresponding to the part number. This process is prone to errors, which may result in an order for a wrong part.
As can be seen, there is a general need for parts catalogs systems that aid an operator's comprehension of a particular part, such as when revising a parts catalog in view of changes to that particular part or when ordering that particular part. Various systems have been designed to aid an operator's comprehension of the parts within a parts catalog.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 06-176085 provides a parts catalog system in which prepared images and attribute information of parts are respectively stored in files. The graphical information and attribute information is recorded as image data and text data, respectively, to form a database used to create a parts list. Some of the attribute information is used to establish a hierarchical relationship between the parts, which improves the operator's general understanding of their organization.
In another example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-167922 provides a parts catalog system in which spatial relationships are established between the parts. In this system, an operator may select a desired part from an image of a plurality of parts forming an assembly. When the operator selects one of the assembled parts displayed on a terminal screen, the parts catalog system displays another part relevant to the selected part on the terminal screen, such that the operator may better distinguish between the parts.
As will be evident to those skilled in the art, though conventional parts catalog systems address the need to aid an operator's comprehension of parts within a parts catalog, they do not adequately address the need for a more in depth understanding of such parts.